Masatsugu Nagato

Masatsugu Nagato
Born	1948-11-18November 18, 1948 (age 77)
Nationality	Japanese
Education	The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Occupation	Banker, business executive
Company	Japan Post Holdings
Title	President and CEO of Japan Post Holdings (2016 to 2020)

Masatsugu Nagato (born November 18, 1948) is a Japanese banker and business executive who was President and CEO of Japan Post Holdings, the holding company of Japan's postal, banking and life insurance group, from April 1, 2016 until January 5, 2020. He had previously been president of Japan Post Bank, which he led from May 2015 through its listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in November 2015.

Nagato spent 34 years at the Industrial Bank of Japan and its successors in the Mizuho Financial Group, rising to managing executive officer and head of the Americas region at Mizuho Corporate Bank. He then moved into manufacturing as an executive at Fuji Heavy Industries, the maker of Subaru cars, where he oversaw overseas sales and became representative director and deputy president. From 2011 to 2015 he was vice chairman and then chairman of Citibank Japan, the Japanese retail banking arm of Citigroup, during a period when the bank was under regulatory pressure over its internal controls.

As head of Japan Post Holdings, Nagato oversaw a group of roughly 245,000 employees and about 24,000 post offices. His tenure included a write-down of about ¥400 billion on the Australian logistics company Toll Holdings, a government secondary offering of the company's shares in 2017, a sale of shares in Japan Post Insurance in 2019 and an investment of about seven percent in the American insurer Aflac.

Nagato resigned in January 2020, taking responsibility for the improper sale of insurance policies by Japan Post Insurance and Japan Post Co. after Japan's Financial Services Agency ordered the two companies to suspend insurance sales for three months. He was succeeded by Hiroya Masuda, a former Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications. Since 2021 he has been a senior advisor to McKinsey & Company and to the investment firm Insight Partners, and since June 2022 an outside director of Rakuten Bank, a position he held as of October 2026.

Early life and education

Nagato was born on November 18, 1948. He joined the Industrial Bank of Japan in April 1972. He later studied at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the United States, which lists him among its alumni of the class of 1975. In his messages to shareholders he used the English name "Mat" alongside his Japanese name.

Career

Industrial Bank of Japan and Mizuho, 1972 to 2006

Nagato joined the Industrial Bank of Japan (IBJ) in April 1972. In June 2000 he became an executive officer of the bank and general manager of its Sales Department II, and in June 2001 he was promoted to managing executive officer and general manager of the research department.

After IBJ was brought into the Mizuho group, Nagato became a managing executive officer of Mizuho Bank in April 2002, in charge of branch sales. In April 2003 he moved to Mizuho Corporate Bank, the group's wholesale bank, as managing executive officer overseeing the Americas region. In total he spent 34 years at IBJ and Mizuho Corporate Bank.

Fuji Heavy Industries, 2006 to 2011

In June 2006 Nagato left banking to become a corporate executive vice president of Fuji Heavy Industries, the industrial group that built Subaru cars. In June 2007 he joined the board as a director and corporate executive vice president, with responsibility for the company's entire overseas sales. In June 2010 he was made representative director of the board and deputy president. When the holding company later nominated Nagato for its board, it cited the breadth of his senior management experience across banking, manufacturing and foreign banking.

Citibank Japan, 2011 to 2015

In June 2011 Nagato became director and vice chairman of Citibank Japan Ltd., the Japanese banking subsidiary of Citigroup. He took the chairmanship on an interim basis in January 2012. In April 2012 Citigroup announced that he would hold the role permanently from June 1, 2012, as part of a reshuffle of its senior management in Tokyo. American Banker reported at the time that Citigroup had been trying to bring in Japanese executives with deep knowledge of the local banking business in an attempt to reassure regulators who had been frustrated with the bank's internal controls. The holding company's own records date his appointment as director and chairman of Citibank Japan to January 2012. He left Citibank Japan to join Japan Post Bank in May 2015.

Japan Post Bank, 2015 to 2016

In May 2015 Nagato was appointed director, president and representative executive officer of Japan Post Bank, the savings bank of the postal group. He took over the bank's presidency from Taizo Nishimuro, the president of Japan Post Holdings, who had run the bank concurrently from April 1 to May 11, 2015. In June 2015 he also became a director of the parent holding company. His arrival came six months before the bank's initial public offering. On November 4, 2015, the holding company, the bank and Japan Post Insurance were listed together on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, in a government sale of shares that the company described as enabling "all citizens to equally purchase them". The holding company later said that Nagato had "an excellent track record" as president of the bank.

Japan Post Holdings, 2016 to 2020

In March 2016 the holding company announced that Nagato would succeed Nishimuro as its president, and he held an inaugural press conference on March 16, 2016. He became director, representative executive officer, president and CEO of the company on April 1, 2016. At the same time he left the bank's presidency but remained on its board, and joined the board of the postal operator Japan Post Co. In June 2016 he also became a director of Japan Post Insurance, so that he sat on the boards of all three main operating companies. At the holding company he was a member of the nomination committee and the compensation committee.

In his first message to shareholders, written in July 2016, Nagato said the group had been listed "at last" and was "about to weigh anchor at port, hoist its sails and embark toward the vast expanse of the open ocean". He set three priorities: expanding profitability, including making the bank's asset management more sophisticated, since it produced the bulk of group profits; improving productivity through manpower management, information technology and business process reengineering; and building corporate governance and a capital strategy appropriate for a listed company.

In May 2018 the group published a three-year medium-term plan covering the fiscal years 2018 to 2020. Nagato said at its launch that it would "face the toughest environment" of any of the group's medium-term plans, because about 70 percent of group profits came from Japan Post Bank and about 20 percent from Japan Post Insurance, both of which were exposed to Japan's ultra-low interest rates. The group set up Japan Post Real Estate Co., which Nagato described as intended to become the group's fourth main source of revenue after postal and logistics, banking and life insurance.

His tenure ended in the insurance mis-selling scandal described below. On December 27, 2019, he announced that he would resign, and he stepped down as representative executive officer and president on January 5, 2020, and as a director on January 11, 2020.

Advisory roles and Rakuten Bank, 2021 to present

In January 2021 Nagato became a senior advisor at McKinsey & Company, and in February 2021 a senior advisor at Insight Partners. In February 2022 he became a director of the Industry Club of Japan, and in June 2022 a non-executive director of Rakuten Bank, the online bank controlled by the Rakuten group. As of October 1, 2026, Rakuten Bank listed him as one of four non-executive directors on its seven-member board who met the requirements for outside directors under Japan's Companies Act, and listed his McKinsey, Insight Partners and Industry Club of Japan roles as current positions.

Leadership and management style

Nagato's public statements as head of the holding company stressed the group's unity, which he called "Team JP". In the 2019 annual report he said that "Japan Post Group employees sometimes speak to me frankly about their concerns whenever I exchange opinions with them", and that the most important factor in motivating staff was for the group to be a "Good Company". He wrote that "employees will never acquire passion for their jobs in a company that lacks a bright future", and that Nagato wanted to make the holding company a "Good Company" that was "admired the world over". He favoured job rotation across group company boundaries and between head office and front-line operations, on the principle that "experience is the best way to gain knowledge".

He framed the group's strategy around the idea of a "Total Lifestyle Support Group", meaning a network that would supply postal, banking and insurance services and, increasingly, other everyday services through its post offices. In the same 2019 report he argued that "maintaining corporate value through self-sustaining growth alone will be difficult", and that the group therefore had to make growth investments, which in broad terms included mergers and acquisitions. He also stressed technology, saying that the logistics business had to watch automation, drones and autonomous driving, and that the banking and insurance businesses had to "rapidly adopt Fintech".

On governance, Nagato wrote that participants at the World Economic Forum in Davos had told him that governance was an important issue for Japan after problems at several Japanese companies. He pointed out that a majority of the directors of the group's companies were outside directors. Within months, the Financial Services Agency found a "dysfunction of corporate governance" at the group.

Major deals and strategic decisions

Toll Holdings write-down

Japan Post Co. completed its purchase of all the shares of Toll Holdings, an integrated logistics company based in Australia, on May 28, 2015, before Nagato became head of the holding company. The deal was intended to expand the group's international logistics business as Japan's domestic postal market shrank. In the fiscal year ended March 31, 2017, Nagato's first full year as president, Toll's results fell because of lower commodity prices and slower growth in China and Australia. The group wrote off the entire amount of goodwill and trademark rights related to Toll and part of its property, plant and equipment, booking impairment losses of ¥400.3 billion, of which ¥368.2 billion was goodwill. As a result, the holding company reported a net loss of ¥28.9 billion for the year, after net income of ¥425.9 billion the year before. Toll's management team was replaced in January 2017 and the business cut costs through workforce reductions and the merger and closure of departments. In the 2019 annual report, Nagato cited Toll as an example of the group's previous growth investments.

Share sales

During Nagato's tenure the company was required by law to cooperate with the government's sale of its shares, the proceeds of which were earmarked for reconstruction after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. After the 2015 listing, the government carried out a secondary offering of the company's shares in September 2017. When a shareholder proposal for the 2018 annual meeting called for a freeze on further offerings at prices below ¥2,000 a share, the board opposed it, saying that it would be "inappropriate to freeze additional offerings of shares just because the share price goes below a certain level" and that it would keep cooperating with the government's policy.

In April 2019 the holding company itself sold shares in Japan Post Insurance, reducing its holding to 64.5 percent. Nagato said that the group intended to keep selling down its holdings in the bank and the insurer step by step until its ownership was around 50 percent, and that the April sale showed a "commitment to providing a greater degree of independence" to the insurer's management.

Aflac alliance

In December 2018, under Nagato, the holding company agreed a "Strategic Alliance Based on Capital Relationship" with Aflac Incorporated and its Japanese subsidiary Aflac Life Insurance Japan, and began investing in Aflac from April 2019. Nagato said the investment would give the holding company about seven percent of Aflac's common shares. Because Aflac's articles of incorporation give each share ten votes after four years of ownership, he expected the holding company's voting rights to pass 20 percent after four years, at which point it could account for its share of Aflac's earnings using the equity method. Charles Lake, the chairman of Aflac Life Insurance Japan, had sat on the holding company's board as an outside director since June 2016.

New products

In April 2019 Japan Post Insurance began selling a rider for advanced medical care and products with relaxed underwriting criteria for people who had previously been unable to buy insurance. In May 2019 Japan Post Bank launched a smartphone payment service called Yucho Pay.

Financial and market performance

The following results for the group cover the fiscal years in which Nagato led the holding company. The fiscal year ends on March 31.

Fiscal year ended	Consolidated ordinary income	Consolidated net ordinary income	Net income attributable to Japan Post Holdings
March 31, 2017	¥13,326.5 billion	¥795.2 billion	Loss of ¥28.9 billion
March 31, 2018	¥12,920.3 billion	¥916.1 billion	¥460.6 billion
March 31, 2019	¥12,774.9 billion	¥830.6 billion	¥479.4 billion
March 31, 2020	¥11,950.1 billion	¥864.4 billion	¥483.7 billion

Sources:

Ordinary income, the group's measure of revenue, fell in each of these years. Net income for the year ended March 2019 was ¥479.4 billion, above the initial forecast of ¥330.0 billion; Nagato attributed this to growth in the Yu-Pack and Yu-Packet parcel services and to investment income at Japan Post Insurance.

The group employed 250,876 people as of March 31, 2016, an increase of 30,173 on the previous year that reflected the consolidation of Toll. The figure was 245,863 as of March 31, 2018 and 245,472 as of March 31, 2020; these counts exclude non-regular employees. Nagato personally held 100 shares of the company in 2016 and 3,800 shares in 2019.

Board memberships and outside roles

• Director, Japan Post Holdings (June 2015 to January 2020)
• Director, Japan Post Co. and Japan Post Bank (from April 2016); director, Japan Post Insurance (from June 2016); all until his resignation in January 2020
• Councillor, Gakushuin School Corporation (from October 2018)
• Senior Advisor, McKinsey & Company (from January 2021)
• Senior Advisor, Insight Partners (from February 2021)
• Director, The Industry Club of Japan (from February 2022)
• Outside director (non-executive), Rakuten Bank (from June 2022)

Controversies

Insurance mis-selling and resignation

In 2019 it emerged that Japan Post Insurance policies, sold through post offices by Japan Post Co., had been sold in ways that harmed customers. Japan Post Insurance said in August 2019 that about 183,000 policies sold over the five years to fiscal 2018 might have been disadvantageous to policyholders. According to the group's own account, these were "specified rewriting cases" in which a customer's policy was cancelled and a new application taken, which in some cases left customers without cover when the new application was declined because of their medical history. The group then investigated all of the roughly 30 million Japan Post Insurance policies of the previous five years, covering about 19 million policyholders. In December 2019 the group said that the number of improper sales cases had reached 12,836, of which 670 involved violations of law or internal rules.

On December 27, 2019, the Financial Services Agency ordered Japan Post Insurance and Japan Post Co. to stop selling insurance products for three months from January 1 to the end of March 2020 and issued business improvement orders to both companies and to their parent. The regulator said that the companies had set sales goals that lacked "feasibility and rationality", and that there was a dysfunction of corporate governance at the group. The same day, Nagato, Japan Post Insurance president Mitsuhiko Uehira and Japan Post president Kunio Yokoyama said that they would resign. At a press conference Nagato said: "I accepted this job because I thought I could contribute to the country but I eventually caused troubles. I feel deep sorrow." He said he had been considering resignation since August.

The holding company later said that Nagato and the other two presidents had resigned "to clarify responsibility for this issue", and that the monthly pay of officers of the companies had been cut. Reuters reported that the scandal had cast a shadow over the government's plan to sell about $10 billion of its shares in the holding company to fund reconstruction after the 2011 earthquake.

Dispute with NHK

The mis-selling was first reported by the public broadcaster NHK in its programme Close-up Gendai+ on April 24, 2018, which included testimony from post office staff that sales quotas pushed them into deceptive sales. A planned follow-up was postponed twice. According to the Asahi Shimbun journalist Tomoya Fujita, the dispute began when the group sent a protest letter to NHK in the joint names of three group company presidents, and in October 2018 NHK's board of governors issued a stern warning to NHK president Ryoichi Ueda over the programme. Fujita's account characterised the group's pressure on NHK as suppression of reporting.

Personal life

Nagato has given few public details about his private life. As of October 2026 there were no reports of his death, and Rakuten Bank listed him as a serving director.

See also

• Japan Post Holdings
• Japan Post Bank
• Japan Post Insurance
• Hiroya Masuda
• Taizo Nishimuro
• Rakuten Bank
• Toll Holdings

External links

• Japan Post Holdings official website
• Rakuten Bank management team